Author Topic: Annoying anti-spam on this website  (Read 5161 times)

bammette

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Annoying anti-spam on this website
« on: November 09, 2016, 02:49:58 AM »
Dear forum users,

I am a new member here and immediately noticed a thoroughly annoying anti-spam system. Let me tell you what's annoying me and what I think you could do to solve it. I know it sounds a bit whiny, but I like to use my computer quickly and anything that prevents my flow and could be prevented should be prevented if you ask me. No, it is not essential, but why not make things better even if it's only a slight improvement.

Context:
1. I made one mistake in my registration, then adjusted it and got the message that I filled in the form faster than possible, therefore it wouldn't register. This is annoying and perhaps you could adjust it such that it only tests this for a new form, not if you've already provided entries to all questions.
2. 1 search every 5 seconds means I have to wait everytime I want to search. It seems like a decent time-limit, but if you make a typo you'll be much faster. Also, sometimes the first post gives you an idea and if you immediately type that you can be faster than 5 seconds (this happened to me). Perhaps it would be more useful to use the same limit, but only apply it when you do more than say 5 searches all within 5 seconds. 5 extra searches wouldn't really hurt the forum that much and it would make it much less annoying to use. A time limit of 2 seconds could also work, this would still allow for typo issues, but they should be quite rare. Perhaps there could also be a second cap like xx searches per hour or something like that.

I'm sure there are more anti-spam implementations on this which are annoying, perhaps someone who knows of any can add them in this topic. While they are useful, they should be implemented such that users notice as little as possible of them. If I notice two within 5 minutes of being registered, I think they could be implemented in a better way. My request would be that you make the anti-spam just a little less annoying.
« Last Edit: November 09, 2016, 02:51:45 AM by bammette »

sgbotsford

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Re: Annoying anti-spam on this website
« Reply #1 on: November 12, 2016, 04:59:38 PM »
Some of this may be built in to Simple Machines (The forum software that TV uses) Some of it may be configurable.

In general things like this should be 'pooled' E.g.  You may run a second search in 5 seconds.  But a normal user wouldn't run 5 searches in 25 seconds.  So the software should watch for obviously abusive behaviour.  Similarly on your registration, a smart system would compare the forms and see how many characters changed.  Some reasonable parameter here would indicate the likeliness of a bot vs a human doing the typing.